Added 7.26.18. To preserve big game animals being hunted to extinction, legendary explorer and taxidermist Carl Akeley embarked time and again on perilous expeditions in the wilds of Africa. This champion of conservation created the African Hall at the New York Museum of Natural History and cavorted with outsize personalities of the times, such as Teddy Roosevelt and P.T. Barnum. His story is told by biographer Jay Kirk in “Kingdom Under Glass.” Milt in 2010 interviews Kirk about the life and times of Akeley. Publisher’s Weekly called Greene’s book, “a rollicking biography” and “epic adventure…a beguiling novelistic portrait of a man and an era straining to hear the call of the wild.”

Added 7.18.18. Urban sociology was born in Chicago at the University of Chicago in the 1930s by street-savvy scholars who got out, explored communities and dug into non-academic realities to develop and test their theories. Broadly speaking, they were seeking  to better understand and document how immigrants, politicians, classes and interest groups in major cities relate to each other and conduct necessary social transactions, so that the urban organism is able to thrive and develop. Milt digs into the roots and present-day lessons of urban sociology for Chicago with two eminent scholars. One is Robert Sampson of Harvard University, author of “Great American City: Chicago And The Enduring Neighborhood Effect.” The other is Philip Nyden, Director of Loyola University’s Center For Urban Research and Learning. Callers add their own insights and observations, including some quite salient intel from a Chicago policeman on escalating gang-related murders.

Added 7.10.18. Milt in 2010 interviewed three Chicago policemen about what their work is like. They are Brendan Daugherty, John Wrigley, and Martin Preib – who had recently authored, “The Wagon And Other Stories From The City.” Describing the book, The Guardian wrote, “At the age of 40, after years in dead-end jobs supporting his writing habit, Preib joined the Chicago police department. His first job was driving the wagon to collect dead bodies, ‘the messy remains of failed life’ ..Preib is clearly not a typical cop. He considers quoting King Lear in a police report and, in between calls, he tells his female partner about how he is inspired by Walt Whitman’s work…From gruesome accounts of collecting corpses to pieces about the daily catalogue of crime and disorder on the city’s streets, these personal essays offer a powerful portrait of the dark side of one of America’s greatest cities.”

Added 7.10.18. Everything you thought you knew about the history of baseball – our “national pastime” – is wrong. Or, at least, quite a bit of it. That is the upshot of a close look at the sport’s long arc in U.S. popular history by Mitchell Nathanson, a professor at the Villanova University School of Law, and author of “A People’s History Of Baseball.” For more of the play-by-play and color commentary, dig in to this 2012 interview of Nathanson, by Milt.

Added 6.26.18. Wars: they just don’t make ’em like they used to. Milt explores the wars of antiquity with noted historian John Lendon of the University of Virginia. Lendon is author of, among other things, the book “Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War.” Milt and Lendon traverse a range of related topics, including ancient Greek history and historians, the tensions between Athens and Sparta, and the role of honor in provoking war. The conversation leads into more contemporary history, and the contours of war in the 20th Century and today.